The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 83

2001, New York

Adam stood beside Sal and gazed out at the darkness. America, at least what they could see of it, a dark wilderness of tall cedar trees beneath a clear night sky and a crescent moon that gazed down at its own shimmering reflection on the gently rippling surface of the East River.

‘It’s like … It’s just how I imagine America must have looked before Columbus first landed,’ Adam whispered. ‘Out there somewhere, there must be tribes of Native Americans, running around, free and living just as they were back in the fifteenth century.’

Sal nodded. ‘I like it like this. No people.’

‘So … Maddy said you came from 2026?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell me, what’s it like?’

She shrugged. ‘Crowded. Busy. Noisy. At least where we lived it was.’

‘Is there any really cool … you know, technology?’

‘Like?’

‘I dunno — flying cars or something?’

Sal snorted. ‘No. It’s all rickshaws and battered old Nanos. The air’s thick with toxins and stuff. And there were the troubles in the north.’

‘Troubles?’

‘Terrorists, bombs. Things weren’t so good with Taliban-Pakistan. My father worried about what was going to happen in India. What with that and the flooding areas and migrants.’

They listened to the woods, the call of a heron, the lapping of the river up the shingle banks nearby.

‘The future doesn’t sound so great,’ said Adam.

‘Uh-uh. I remember … everything felt so … so — ’ she struggled to find a word that worked — ‘so … temporary. Like you couldn’t really get used to anything, because you knew it wasn’t going to last forever.’

‘Sheesh, that’s my future too, then. Twenty-five years from now.’ He did a quick sum. ‘I’ll be fifty-two, fifty-three then. I wonder if I’ll still be in New York?’

‘New York’s not so good,’ she replied. ‘They started evacuating parts of it.’

‘Flooding?’

‘Uh-huh. And growing crime and food riots and stuff. Like we were having in Mumbai.’

‘Jesus,’ Adam sighed. ‘You make the future sound depressing.’

‘Sorry,’ she replied softly.

‘No — not your fault, Sal. Thanks for, you know, being honest about it.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Makes you wonder why you bother doing anything if that’s how it all goes. Like, why am I bothering with my consulting job? Saving up for a retirement that sounds like, well … a nightmare.’

‘It’s only a nightmare for the poor,’ she replied. ‘For those with lots of money it’s just …’ Sal hesitated.

‘Sal? What is it?’

She looked at him. ‘I think there’s a big wave coming.’ She leaned around and ducked her head under the shutter. ‘Maddy! Time wave! Big one!’

Maddy pulled herself off the bunk and staggered bleary-eyed to join them in the doorway.

‘There it is!’ said Sal, pointing east.

A dark wall approached; like last time, rolling in from the Atlantic, looking like a mountain range advancing rapidly towards them.

‘Better come inside, so you’re not right on the edge of the concrete,’ Maddy said, pointing at the crumbling edge of the field office’s force-field effect. Adam and Sal shuffled quickly inside and crouched on the floor just inside the archway.

‘Here it comes,’ uttered Maddy. ‘Just hope this one gets us back.’

Adam watched the churning black wall approach like a tsunami, blotting out the sky, the stars, the crescent moon. ‘I wonder whether we’d be better hanging on to this,’ he said, nodding at the wilderness. ‘Given how it all goes in the future.’

‘Too late,’ said Sal.

The time wave rolled over Manhattan and the distant tall trees quivered and shook and vanished and swirled into a maelstrom of flickering possibilities. As the wave swept across the broad river, Adam thought he saw the ghostly outline of skyscrapers forming. Then, with a fresh gust of wind pushed before it, the wave was over them; a destructive tornado passing momentarily overhead, eating up reality that shouldn’t be and laying down, in its wake, reality that should.

And then as soon as it had arrived it was gone.

Outside, a cobbled street littered with plastic bags and several wheeled dustbins. And the ambient noises of New York.

Sal was the first to step out. She looked to her left, towards the river, and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘looks like we’re back home.’

Adam and Maddy joined her. Manhattan glistened, flickered, shimmered in the night; the sky punctuated with the far-off winking lights of commercial airliners coming in to JFK and LaGuardia. A distant police siren, the booming of someone’s sound system.

A Monday night in New York, still very much alive, noisy and busy, even approaching midnight.

‘I better go check our database and see if history’s properly back,’ said Maddy.

Sal and Adam watched the night in silence for a while.

‘I kind of liked Manhattan the way it just was,’ said Adam.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Sal sadly. ‘Me too.’